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Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Is Pluralism Enough?

Fr
John Strickland, reflecting on the Renaissance of Western Europe, wrote,

. . .

For Burckhardt, the Renaissance (for the first time
a distinct period in history) became the moment of cultural liberation, the
breakthrough into the modern age of humanism, individualism, and
secularism.. . .

At
the heart of this breakthrough was the Renaissance’s reflection on the human
condition. Traditional Christianity, as I have noted in earlier posts,
contained within it an exalted view of the human being, made in God’s image and
made for a relationship of immediate and eternal communion with God. In eastern
Christendom Orthodox Christianity had maintained this anthropological optimism
about man, but in the centuries that followed the Great Schism of 1054 a more
pessimistic view of man had been established in the west. By the time Petrarch
appeared in fourteenth-century Italy,
this pessimism was great indeed. Soon it would be challenged directly by
leading Renaissance humanists such as Giannozzo Manetti (d. 1459). His On the Dignity of Man boldly confronted
one of the middle ages most widely published and influential anthropological
treatises, Pope Innocent III’s The Misery
of the Human Condition. Even more famously, Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola (d. 1494) issued his own On the Dignity of Man as a corrective to the pessimistic
anthropology that had come to choke the culture of western Christendom.

Burckhardt
himself regarded the “rediscovery” of human dignity to be the central
achievement of the Renaissance, which alone was sufficient “to fill us with
everlasting thankfulness.” He actually paraphrased Mirandola’s treatise as the
conclusion to his study of Renaissance anthropology.

The
statement is remarkable. The human being is no longer the plaything of the
passions, no longer enslaved to the “evil desire” identified by Augustine as
the Achilles Heel (to use a classical allusion) of the human will. Man is no
longer subject to the demons. He is completely free to choose the good for
himself. He is autonomous.

“I
have set thee,” Burckhardt (via Mirandola) has the Creator say to Adam,

in
the midst of the world that thou mayst the more easily behold and see all that
is therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal
nor immortal only, that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself.
Thou mayst sink into a beast, and be born anew to the divine likeness. . . . To
thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on thine own free
will.

Remarkable!
This, readers of my blog will recall, had been the claim of
Pelagius, the fourth-century heretic who claimed that human salvation is merely
a matter of choosing freely to save oneself by embracing the Christian life.
Against Pelagianism Saint Augustine had developed a doctrine of original sin
that asserted man’s powerlessness in the face of evil and led to doctrines of
predestination and universal human depravity. In the Christian east, by
contrast, church fathers never embraced such a pessimistic view and spoke of
human free participation in the life of God. But in the west, under the long
and brilliant influence of Augustine, a series of pessimistic views about man
came to prevail and led, over the centuries, to the desiccation of the human
experience of paradise, of man’s participation in the kingdom of heaven.

The
humanist breakthrough of the Renaissance, then, was not only a reaction against
the anthropological pessimism of the medieval west, it was a kind of parallel
to the optimistic anthropology of the Orthodox east. But this parallel was,
tragically, blind. So little spiritual communion existed between eastern and
western Christendom after nearly five centuries of division that Italian
humanists showed little interest in the former. Plenty of western scholars were
beginning to take an interest in “Greek learning”–most notably Petrarch
himself–but theirs was not a theological interest. For them, the wisdom of the
Greeks was the pagan Plato, not the Christian Palamas.

Whether
medieval scholasticism’s tendency to “know about God rather than know him” was
responsible, or something deeper in the fabric of western culture, the first
humanists of the Italian Renaissance broke free of traditional Christian
anthropology to join Mirandola in assigning to modern man a secular horizon for
his fulfillment. Still driven instinctively (though perhaps unconciously) by
traditional Christianity’s transformational imperative, but desiccated of the
spiritual experience of paradise, he was now free to build a utopia.

The
foundation of the American Empire is built squarely upon Renaissance
ideas:human perfectibility without
Grace, rationalism, a cosmos of dead matter that must be given new shape and
meaning by man (since he is now God), secularism, individualism.Such utopias of the Kingdom of Man usually
tend toward extreme centralization (the terrors of utopia are easier to impose
on the willing and the unwilling under that kind of system), and it is no
different in ‘exceptional’ America (or, rather, in the America that has arisen
since the end of the War of Northern Aggression, when New England culture
gained dominance over all the States).

The
Southern Agrarians have tried to mount opposition to these forces that have
developed in American culture.H. Lee
Cheek, Jr., wrote of their efforts,

Among
the contributions to I’ll Take My Stand,
Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” is usually interpreted as the
most acerbic, immoderate, and unusual essay in the collection. All too often
the essay is read as an apologia for violence or an eccentric defense of
tradition. In fact, Tate–like his fellow Agrarians–was seeking to remind his
readers of the religious and political society that was once the South. More
importantly, Tate’s essay is a plea for a recovery of what has been lost: a
humane social order.

Nourished
by daily labors in the fields, it was the properly ordered agrarian community
that produced a more stable and wholesome environment for families and workers
than industrialism could offer. According to Tate, an agrarian environment encouraged
a life more conducive to religious and ethical living as well. In regard to
farming, the experience of tilling the soil and harvesting crops embodied a
sense of self-sacrifice and an attachment to a shared community. Farming was by
its very nature a communal, rather than a solitary act. The primary aesthetic
and spiritual needs of humankind were best fulfilled by the structure and
corporate nature of an agrarian society. Tate’s close friend and fellow
Agrarian, Andrew Lytle, convincingly reaffirmed this sentiment years later:
“Agriculture is a limited term. A better one is farming. It is inclusive.
Unlike any other occupation, farming is, or should be, a way of life.”

Genuine
cultural renewal could not take place without appreciating the agrarian worldview—grounded
in a connection to the soil and love for the Creator that was increasingly less
palpable to Tate’s generation, and at the end of 20th century even the memory
of such an existence is quickly fading.

. . .

The
Southern and agrarian tradition in America produced a very different
understanding of what was really most important. Against the tendency to
endorse a theocratic and unitary form of life, this experience accommodated
divergent theological and political understandings of order and sought to
nurture an ecumenism grounded in the acceptance of dissent and a diffusion of
political power.

Liberty was conceived in terms of its corporateness, a societas, combining the family and
larger units of an interconnected citizenry with each other to form
associations. Instead of the rigorous moral codes found in New
England, the Southern colonies were more dependent upon the
English model of ecclesiastic and civil subsidiarity, relying on
representatives nearest the situation to provide order and preside over the
deliberation of disputes. In essence, the religious and political developments
within the South were founded upon a spirit of localism in theory and practice.
The movement towards “establishing” state-sponsored churches met, for example, with
great success in New England, while in the
South a decentralized theory of control and the habit of localism in matters of
church and state insured a greater autonomy and forbearance among the
associations of the faithful and governing authorities.

. . .

Even though the Agrarians were an assortment of
representatives with many theoretical and geographical differences, they were
united by an unwillingness to accept consolidationist measures, regardless of
the form, and insistent upon protecting a decentralized, group-oriented
society, as defined in a variety of ways.

Instead
of New England’s centralism and uniformity,
the South has taken hold of the other side of the political dialectic:localism and variety.

Richard
Weaver, one of the later Southern Agrarians, wrote in Visions of Order,

. . . The
truth is that if the culture is to assume form and to bring the satisfactions
for which cultures are created, it is not culturally feasible for everyone to
do everything “any way he wants to.”There is at the heart of every culture a center of authority from which
there proceed subtle and pervasive pressures upon us to conform and to repel
the unlike as disruptive.. . .

At this center there lies a “tyrannizing image,”
which draws everything toward itself.This
image is the ideal of its excellence..
. . This is the sacred well of the culture from which inspiring waters like
magnetic lines of force flow out and hold the various activities in a
subservience of acknowledgment.Not to
feel this magnetic pull toward identification and assimilation is to be outside
the culture (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006, pgs. 11-2).

Now,
Mr Weaver’s truth about the ‘tyrannizing image’ in culture poses great
difficulties for the South, trying as she is to build a culture out of
ecumenism, out of a ‘pluralistic Protestant establishment’ (M. E. Bradford,
‘Where We Were Born and Raised’, The
Reactionary Imperative, Peru, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1990, p.
132).For pluralism/ecumenism deny that
ultimate truth can be known by man, which leads, as Solzhenitsyn said, to
apathy for truth, and then, if the process is not halted, hatred of truth.Pluralism is the negation of truth and thus
of culture, splintering them and individualizing them; she is the mother of
relativism.The only heresy, the only
outrage, in such a stage of social life is to declare something a heresy.

Most
would probably say that the Bible is this sort of cultural unifier in the
mostly Protestant South, but per Protestant doctrine, each believer, free from
the influence of any other, is the final arbiter of what the Holy Scripture
says, that is, of dogma.This leads not
to unity but to deeper and deeper divisions - ultimately to chaos.

But
the flourishing of the literary, musical, and other arts in Dixie
is not a witness to disharmony in the Southern soul, but to her grasp in some
measure of an absolute, unifying truth that imparts order within and without.The trouble for the South has been where to
locate that truth.Because of the
effects of the Great Schism and the Reformation on the Church in Western
European civilization, not a few Southerners have been put off by the
disagreements over doctrine they see in the Western denominations.William Gilmore Simms put into words this
Southern frustration in his oration Poetry
and the Practical:

And the churches, and the expounders of the Faith,
themselves, have done not a little towards lessening their own authority, in
the variety of the doctrines, and the caprices which mark their
requisitions.The simplicity of divine
Truth is impaired, if not mutilated, in the complexity of dogmas, and the very
draperies of doctrine are calculated to obscure, if not to crush out the
vitality in that Faith, which they were only designed to clothe.When rival churches array their hosts for
conflict, the very identity of truth grows questionable, and we know not well
what to believe unless we call in the help of other teachers.It is, therefore, with no lack of reverence
for these, that I declare the conviction that God has not confided us to these
only.He has not left himself without
other witnesses, thronging earth and air, thronging your common highway, all of
whom cooperate for his glory, and as dutiful ministers to the eternal needs of
man.. . . Nature, through which we
behold God himself every where about us, is full of her ministries.. . . These are required to . . . impress, in
some degree, and through some medium his moral and spiritual senses.. . . Earth, ocean, sky, all speak to him in
turn, with ceaseless varieties of aspect, compel his admiration, awaken his
curiosity, inspire him with wonder, with awe and with affection (Fayetteville,
Ark.:U of Ark. Press, 1996, pgs. 26-7).

So,
having little success with the divided Western denominations, Mr Simms and the later
Agrarians have tried to transcend them, to supply for the unifying image the
order of nature, the farming way of life, complete with its own religious
overtones.

There
is some wisdom in preaching this sort of naturalism.For the pre-Christian heathen peoples were
made ready to accept the Gospel as they gained virtues by the hard work of
body, mind, and soul as farmers, herdsmen, woodsmen, etc., and then as they
contemplated the eternal Logos in His creation in which they lived and worked.These blessings of virtue and insight will
always be within reach of those living close to the land.But since this naturalism is only a
supplement to the full Christian revelation, it provides little shielding
against the furious axe-blows of nominalistic Progress that are savaging the
South.

Southern
culture has been able to successfully bear witness to some aspects of the truth
that it has gleaned from the Western denominations, from the ‘book of nature’,
from experiences in the War, etc., but because of the South’s uncertainty over
the real source and content of the full, undistorted, and absolute truth (which
are only found within the Holy Orthodox Church), and her resultant tilt toward
pluralism, her culture has been waning and not waxing through the years.

Among
the other things within the full Christian revelation of the Orthodox Church
(the original Christian Church, to which all Europe belonged before the Schism
got underway round about the 9th hundredyear, and became official in
1054) that would help in the Southern battle against Modernity and for
tradition is the idea of mystery, of paradox (i.e., that contradictory things may
be united into one without division or confusion).This absence is the result of Aristotle’s and
St Augustine’s
rationalistic, speculative theology and philosophy in the West (and is to be
found in both Protestant and Roman Catholic doctrine); such speculations must
be rejected if we are to regain some cultural stability.

The
Orthodox Church has always held to this teaching about paradox.It is seen clearly in her teaching about the
Holy Trinity (three Persons sharing one nature, one life; not an Augustinian
simple essence from whence arises a structure of impersonal entities who are
defined merely by function and relation); the Lord Jesus Christ (one Person
possessing two natures, divine and human; indeed, He has united Himself with
the whole cosmos He created through His union with our flesh.But this union is not possible in Protestant
and Roman Catholic theology; God’s dealings with the creation in their teaching
will always be through some created intermediary - the Bible or created grace
or etc.); humanity (many persons sharing one nature, one life); and the Church
(the union of the Divine and the human that forms Christ’s Body).

But
how can this help?Because every society
needs both unity and diversity to be healthy, not just one or the other.To have one without the other leads to grave
problems, to an unending swing of the pendulum between the one and the many: from calcified, oppressive centralism and
uniformity on the one hand, toward revolutionary democracy and chaotic
individualism on the other, and back the other way in hopes of finding
stability again.

In
an Orthodox country, there is both unity and diversity.At the center, giving unity, life, strength,
and direction to all in the society, is the Orthodox Faith, or rather, the God
that it proclaims.He is the
‘tyrannizing image’.Not the Pope of
Rome; not the Bible; not a charismatic preacher.But the One True God, the All-Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.Salvation of all the people in Him through
the Second Person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the goal of an
Orthodox country, and both Church and State co-operate toward this end.They are fellow-workers in this greatest of
creative acts (i.e., the making of new creations, of sons of God).They do not compete with one another for
worldly glory and conquest.The
authorities of both seek to turn the gaze of their countrymen, whom they know
and understand to be their extended family, to the Kingdom of Heaven.

But
diversity is not lost.While all hold to
one faith, there have always been different ways of expressing it.In Western Europe before the Great Schism,
and elsewhere in the Orthodox world, there were and are different forms of the
Divine Liturgy used among the different peoples, (Mozarabic in Spain, Gallic
in the French lands, Celtic, Byzantine, and so on).Chanting/Singing styles differ, as do icon
styles, church architecture, and so on, amongst countries and regions.The Orthodox Church does not stifle local
cultures but acts as a leaven within them, bringing them to their full
stature:i.e., the full manifestation of
an image of Christ seen in the whole life of a people that is unique to them
and to them alone, who bring it into being with the help of the Holy Ghost from
the unique gifts of soul, body, mind, past, present, land and water features,
etc. available to them.

And
while bishops and priests have been given a special duty to guard and teach the
Faith and administer God’s Grace in the Sacraments, they remain one with the
rest of the members of the Church.There
is no clericalism, no artificial division, no caste system.The Orthodox Church is one Body.Bishops, priests, deacons, readers,
monastics, abbots, laymen, parish councils, and such all have their own
particular role in the Church, in defending and spreading the Faith, in helping
one another toward salvation.

This
oneness and manyness in the Orthodox Church is incarnated politically in that
villages, towns, monasteries, and other ‘little platoons’ (to use Burke’s
famous phrase) in Orthodox countries are largely autonomous from the
interference of national authorities while nevertheless remaining loyal to them,
and serving them when the fatherland in some time of need requires it.

In
the Roman Catholic Church, this is not so.Local cultures are subordinated to the Latin language and culture, which
is absolutist and centralized.Church life
is subordinated to the Pope and bishops/Magisterium.In the Protestant churches, reacting against
the Roman Catholic hypercentralism, they have given greater freedom to local
churches, pastors, laymen, etc. but now have little to no source of unity that
can call forth a manly defense against attacks on the social fabric.Both imbalances are deadly for a healthy
culture in the long run.

Orthodoxy,
having the fulness of the Faith, is free of these defects and therefore gives a
much greater fullness and wholeness to life in this world than what the West
has been able to offer since the Schism.Here is a little of what Archimandrite Vaseleios had to say about life
in Orthodox countries in What Is Unique
about Orthodox Culture:

Equality does not mean levelling – that is a
disaster, a process which is unnatural for all.Equality within the Church means that each person finds his own
rhythm.That he delights in his
life.That he finds the glory in
humility, the wealth in voluntary poverty, the true, total marriage with the
grace of God through purity of life. (2nd ed., E. Theokritoff,
trans., Montreal, Quebec: Alexander Press, 2001, p. 14)

This
is another seeming paradox:Embrace of
absolute Truth by a people leads not to absolutism (hypercentralization) in
politics, etc. but to the healthy, easy-going subsidiarity (or conciliarity)
for which the South has advocated.But
should they reject it for partial truth (as with ecumenism/pluralism), then
various social maladies arise and freedom disappears.

Speaking
more broadly about the ends of man and society, culture and politics, he said:

Man, whether he believes or not, or even if he
thinks he believes or thinks he does not believe, desires Theosis (deification) by grace, the undescribable theosis which is granted by the Theanthropos [i.e., God-man--W.G.].Whatever is given to man, which does not have
theosis as its ultimate end is
unworthy of him; it devalues both those who give it and those who receive it
because it does not conquer death.Man
finds comfort, not when he is conscripted into a certain group to march against
others, but when he is enjoined with everyone on behalf of everyone.When one is enlisted with Him who was
crucified in order to save His friends, then everyone becomes His friend, even
those who crucify Him.

. . .

We are able to receive a little of the grace of God
which was the Lord’s “before the existence of the world.”(John 17:5)This timeless and uncreated glory is shared impassibly and is partaken
of in its entirety.Therefore, when a
person receives a certain grace as an energy of the Holy Spirit, he receives in
this manner the whole intelligible pearl of the Holy Spirit.It is the same with Holy Communion such that
by receiving a holy pearl, a very small part of the Lord’s body and blood, yet
one receives the entire Christ.And that
which we deeply desire is actualized:everyone receives not merely a fragment, mechanically divided, but takes
the whole, which is given divinely.We
do not become a mere part of the whole, but rather the whole is recapitulated
within each of us.Thus through this
same grace, through this same gift, everyone is liberated because he receives
the whole; at the same time we are all united because we represent the same
fullness.There is an interpenetration (perichoresis) of true unity and true
freedom.Thus we transcend, not only
from the wisdom of ancient Greece
to the foolishness of the Gospel, that is, living the experience of salvation,
but we surpass the democratic system as well.The conciliar form of governance is actualized:human society living the Trinitarian mode of
existence by grace (Europe and the Holy
Mountain, 2nd ed., C. Kokenes, trans., Montreal, Quebec:
Alexander Press, 1999, pgs. 22-3, 26).

By
accepting the deformations of life that have arisen from the revolutions of
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and the Renaissance-Enlightenment as
normative; by accepting pluralism more and more as her plumbline, the South is
left with a paltry alternative to an authentic Christian culture:the ‘humane social order’ with its dim
understanding of the good life and how to achieve it, in which means (decentralization,
sane farming practices, clean environment, strong economy, etc.) are confused
with ends (theosis/salvation), in which Christianity may only manifest itself
in a man’s closet or within the walls of a church, but not in public (that
would be an unacceptable ‘establishment of religion’), leaving the field of
culture wide open for domination by other claimants:scientism, environmentalism,
constitutionalism, etc.

Allen
Tate and the Southern Agrarians past and present as a whole were right about
many things, but they went terribly wrong in dismissing the ‘Russian or Eastern
European mind’ (i.e., the Orthodox Faith) as ‘quite simply supernaturalism or
the naïve religion of the entire horse’ (Allen Tate, ‘Remarks on the Southern
Religion’, I’ll Take My Stand, Baton
Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 2006, p. 163).This Orthodox Church that they so easily belittled, this union of Heaven
and earth, this New Eden, this Body of the Crucified, Risen, and Ascended Lord
Jesus Christ, is the only hope of cultural renewal the South, and every other
country, has got. Any other house of
salvation has mixed the pure gold and silver and the precious stones of
Orthodoxy with the straw and chaff of man-made religions, and will be unable to
withstand the cataclysmic hellfires Modernity has lit throughout the South.